Social Stratification and Postnatural Architecture: A New Architectural Paradigm

The history of buildings is, to a large extent, the history of how we have produced, controlled and inhabited height. For millennia, verticality was a privilege reserved for temples, palaces, fortresses or funerary monuments. In the last two centuries, thanks to the development of the modern elevator and new structural technologies, this verticality has been democratized, commercialized and has become a scene of social segregation, technical innovation and the construction of new urban imaginaries.

Today there is a very clear paradox: while high floors in many cities concentrate the most expensive and desired homes – penthouses with views, light and privacy -, a growing part of society also aspires to live in the city as if they lived in the countryside, that is, with cleaner air, vegetation, relative silence and contact with natural cycles. This tension is driving a profound transformation of architecture: buildings are no longer defined solely by their height, but by their technological capacity to produce living environments (light, climate, biodiversity, energy) that we previously associated almost exclusively with the rural landscape.

To understand this displacement, it is necessary to cross three stories: the history of height in architecture, the history of the elevator as a key technology of the modern city and the contemporary history of new building technologies that are emancipating the quality of space with respect to the mere height above the ground.

BEFORE THE ELEVATOR: WHEN THE HEIGHT WAS A PUNISHMENT

Until the mid-19th century, height had a primarily ritual and defensive meaning: pyramids, ziggurats, bell towers, military towers or Gothic cathedrals used verticality to symbolically inscribe themselves between earth and sky, or to visually dominate the territory. Height was, above all, a language of religious, political or military power. However, in residential buildings, height was more of an everyday problem.

In cities like Paris, buildings from the 18th and 19th centuries had a very clear vertical organization: the ground floor and first floor were reserved for commercial uses and wealthy homes, the middle floors accommodated the middle classes, and the top floors under the roof—the well-known chambres de bonne—were intended for servants and the poor. Climbing several flights of stairs had a physical and temporal cost that translated directly into an income hierarchy: the higher up, the more effort, less prestige and the lower economic value of the home.

This pattern was repeated, with variations, in many European cities. The “best” thing was close to the street; The “worst” was accumulated on the upper floors, without an elevator, with worse thermal and lighting conditions. Everyday height, every day, was not experienced as a privilege, but as a physical and social punishment.

First photograph of Paris (1839). Place de la République in Paris. Louis Daguerre.

THE ELEVATOR AS A SPATIAL AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION

The decisive leap came with the development of the modern elevator and, in particular, with the invention of the safety brake by Elisha Graves Otis and its famous demonstration in 1853, at the Crystal Palace in New York. By cutting the rope and stopping the platform abruptly, the device stopped being a dangerous machine and became a reliable vertical transportation technology. From there, the Otis Elevator Company and other companies began installing passenger elevators in office buildings and hotels, and, soon, in residential buildings.

This technical innovation has immediate spatial consequences: it makes upper floors accessible, usable and, above all, marketable. The elevator makes the tall building viable as a repeatable typology, inaugurates the cycle of skyscrapers and completely modifies the relationship between the human body and architectural verticality. The distance that separates the lobby from the tenth floor is no longer measured in steps and sweat but instead in seconds of mechanical movement.

From a social point of view, the elevator opens the door to a complete redistribution of the value of the different floors: in the medium term, higher heights are no longer synonymous with precariousness and begin to be associated with environmental advantages (views, light, air) that today seem obvious to us.

FROM PHYSICAL EFFORT TO MECHANICAL COMFORT: THE INVERSION OF THE SOCIAL LOGIC OF HEIGHT

With the progressive generalization of the elevator, height ceased to be an inevitable punishment and became an opportunity for comfort and prestige. Upper floors began to be valued for their greater natural lighting, panoramic views and the feeling of distance from the noise and dirt of the street. There was thus an almost complete reversal of the social logic of verticality.

What was previously cheap housing (the top floor) is beginning to become high-end housing. The attic becomes a status symbol: the top of the building becomes the place of maximum residential aspiration. Meanwhile, the residential ground floor—in many contexts—loses relative value: more noise, less privacy, greater exposure to theft or nuisance.

Recent studies on vertical segregation in apartment blocks in different European cities indicate that, in many cases, the high socioeconomic categories are concentrated on the upper floors, while the most vulnerable categories are distributed on the ground or intermediate floors. Height, which in the 19th century functioned as an indicator of poverty, has become an indicator of wealth in many 21st century cities. The machine that promised to democratize height ends up accompanying, paradoxically, a process of re-elitization of the upper levels.

VERTICALITY, SKYSCRAPERS AND “CULTURE OF CONGESTION”

The generalization of the elevator coincides with the development of structural steel and reinforced concrete. These technologies make it possible for height to stop being exceptional and become just another parameter of architectural planning and design. At the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, cities such as Chicago and New York experimented with skyscrapers as a response to the concentration of economic activities in the financial center and the high value of land.

The Manhattan skyline, with its succession of towers such as the Woolworth Building, the Chrysler Building or the Empire State Building, is not only an iconic image, but the materialization of a specific urban culture that Rem Koolhaas described as “congestion culture”: buildings that accumulate in a vertical section programs that were previously distributed horizontally, superimposing offices, hotels, leisure, services and, to a lesser extent, housing. Height stops being a simple geometric data and becomes a form of social and economic organization.

Photograph of the construction of the Empire State Building (1930).

In the publication “Delirious New York”, Rem Koolhaas describes the appearance of the skyscraper as a “living machine” where verticality ceases to be an exceptional condition and becomes a programmatic system capable of superimposing autonomous worlds within the same building. This idea—the “culture of congestion”—reveals that height is not simply a geometric attribute, but rather an infrastructure of radical compatibility that allows multiple urban realities to coexist without interference. For Koolhaas, Manhattan thus invents a model of urbanism that frees architecture from the limitations of the land, giving rise to buildings where each floor can function as an independent city.

This paradigm is key to understanding the contemporary stratification of housing: verticality not only orders bodies in space, but also economies, interior climates, imaginaries and social hierarchies. The post-natural city that is emerging today—where environmental technologies make it possible to simulate fragments of nature at height—precisely extends that Manhattan legacy: the ability to produce self-sufficient artificial worlds, where the quality of life no longer depends on direct contact with the terrain, but on the technical sophistication of the building. Koolhaas thus anticipates, in a visionary way, the current shift towards hybrid architectures that mix metropolitan density and landscape aspirations typical of the countryside.

The work “Countryside, A report” by Rem Koolhaas helps to understand that contemporary architecture is transformed not only from the vertical city, but also from a field that is today highly technical. Koolhaas shows that the current rural environment functions as an ecological and technological laboratory whose advances are directly influencing urban buildings. This perspective reinforces the central idea of ​​this article: the quality of architectural life in the 21st century does not depend on height, but on the capacity of buildings to integrate nature, climate control and technology in all their floors. Postnatural architecture is thus presented as the convergence between the urban density described in “Delirious New York” and the advanced ecology that Koolhaas identifies in “Countryside, A report”.

AMO & Koolhaas, R. (2020). Countryside, A report. Taschen. 

In the 20th and early 21st centuries, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) documents a race for height that shifts the symbolic leadership of modernity from the United States to Asia and the Middle East. The Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the Shanghai Tower or the Burj Khalifa in Dubai embody this stage in which the tallest building in the world functions as an emblem of geopolitical ambition, technical capacity and economic power.

THE CRITICAL LOOK: SOCIAL PRODUCTION OF SPACE AND VERTICAL SEGREGATION

While engineering celebrates the possibility of building ever higher, urban theory and critical geography introduce less euphoric readings. Henri Lefebvre, in “The Production of Space”, proposes to understand space not as a neutral void, but as the result of social relations, practices and representations. From this perspective, the vertical city and the tall building are not only technical artifacts, but devices that organize and stratify social life.

Vertical segregation—who lives on what floor, what views, what light and what silence each has—becomes a specific field of study. Contemporary research on post-socialist European cities, Mediterranean cities or global metropolises shows that stratification by height can overlap with other forms of inequality, such as income, education or ethnicity. Height is, once again, a language of power, but now produced and mediated by the technology of the elevator and by the logic of the real estate market.

NEW TECHNOLOGIES THAT TRANSFORM THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HEIGHT AND ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY

In the 21st century, talking about tall buildings implies talking about sustainability, energy efficiency, environmental comfort and technological integration. The question is no longer just “how big is the building?”, but “how does it behave environmentally?” and “what quality of life does it offer in each of its plants?”

Among the main innovations that are changing the relationship between height and habitability we can point out:

– Active façade systems: double skins, adjustable slats, solar control glass and devices that allow natural ventilation. The envelope is no longer a static skin, but a dynamic system that regulates light, heat and ventilation.

– Integration of vegetation: green roofs, vertical gardens, green terraces, high-altitude urban gardens, vertical forests. The vegetation ceases to be a residual element of the landscape and becomes ecological infrastructure incorporated into the building section.

– New generation elevators: systems without a machine room, magnetic technologies and even prototypes that allow horizontal and diagonal movements, freeing the plant from the rigidity of the traditional vertical core.

– Environmental monitoring: air quality, temperature, humidity and noise sensors connected to intelligent building management systems, capable of automatically adapting blinds, air conditioning or ventilation.

– Integrated renewable energies: photovoltaic on façade and roof, geothermal, aerothermal and, in some cases, small wind turbines; the building becomes a partial energy producer.

– “Vertical urbanism” strategies: design of tall buildings that integrate mixed uses, high-rise public spaces, elevated plazas and interior pedestrian routes, so that the tower is closer to the concept of a “portion of the city” than that of an isolated object.

What is relevant is that many of these technologies do not strictly depend on the building being very tall; They can also be applied in medium or low-rise buildings. Environmental quality stops being an exclusive “prize” for the top floors and becomes an objective distributed throughout the entire building. In this way, height loses part of its symbolic and commercial monopoly as a criterion of value.

LIVING IN THE CITY WITH COUNTRY LIFE: HYBRID ARCHITECTURES

In parallel to these technical advances, social demand is oriented towards an increasingly clear aspiration: to live in the city with many of the environmental qualities of life in the countryside. This translates into the desire to have:

– Views of vegetation instead of just concrete,

– Cleaner air,

– Greater presence of natural light,

– Lower noise,

– Private or shared outdoor spaces (terraces, balconies, patios),

– Presence of water, shade and biodiversity.

Projects such as the Bosco Verticale in Milan, by Stefano Boeri Architetti, have become icons of this turn towards what we could call “hybrid landscapes”: dense urban towers that, at the same time, function as supports for a complex plant ecosystem. In these architectures, trees and bushes are distributed along the facades and terraces, so that each home has a direct relationship with the vegetation and, at the same time, the building improves the microclimate of the urban environment: it reduces the heat island, filters particles and CO2, dampens noise and generates habitat for birds and insects.

The interesting thing is that this logic is not limited to large emblematic projects: many interventions in collective housing, on a smaller scale, already incorporate green roofs, plant trellises, planted galleries or garden patios as ordinary design strategies. The architecture thus responds to a very specific social aspiration: to remain in the city, with its advantages of proximity to services, work and culture, but surrounded by elements that we previously associated with the rural house or the agricultural landscape.

BEYOND THE HEIGHT: TOWARDS A CONTEXTUAL AND CRITICAL VERTICALITY

In light of all the above, height is no longer the only central parameter of architecture and urban planning. Instead of just asking “how many floors does the building have?”, we should ask ourselves:

– What spatial efficiency does it offer? How much living space does it generate for each occupied floor unit and envelope built?

– What functional flexibility does it have? Can it change use, combine housing, work and leisure, or be recycled over time without requiring massive demolitions?

– How is it integrated into the public transport network, pedestrian life and the existing urban fabric?

– What impact does it have on the urban climate, on ventilation, on solar radiation on the streets, on the generation of beneficial or harmful shadows?

– What type of spatial justice does it produce? How do you distribute views, light, silence and accessibility between different social groups?

Contemporary studies on “vertical urbanism” or “sustainable vertical city” propose that high-rise buildings can be part of the solution to certain urban challenges (congestion, land consumption, emissions), but only if they are conceived within broad strategies of sustainable mobility, mix of uses, social equity and ecological transition. Otherwise, they risk becoming simple artifacts of formal spectacle and income concentration.

CONCLUSIONS: FROM THE ATTIC AS A PRIVILEGE TO THE DISTRIBUTION OF QUALITY ON ALL FLOORS

The historical evolution from bonne chambres to luxury penthouses, from endless stairs to smart elevators, and from pyramidal temples to vertical forests, shows a fundamental shift:

– In the first phase, the height is exceptional, ritual or defensive. Tall buildings are unique objects that symbolically condense the power of a civilization.

– In a second phase, height becomes an economic tool thanks to the elevator and the new structures; skyscrapers, skylines and vertical segregation appear.

– In a third phase, the current one, height alone is no longer enough: what matters is the capacity of buildings to produce healthy, climatically responsible and socially equitable living conditions on any floor.

The wealthy classes, who in the 19th century took shelter on the ground floors, now take refuge on the upper floors. The “good life” has risen, guided by the elevator car. But, at the same time, contemporary technologies are beginning to question whether spatial privilege is reduced to the limit: a good 21st century building should be able to distribute environmental quality in a balanced way across all its floors, regardless of whether they are closer to the ground or the sky.

In a society that wants to live in the city with everything that country life contains, the challenge of architecture is no longer to build higher, but to build better at each height: mix programs, incorporate nature, reduce vertical inequalities and understand verticality as one of the many possible languages ​​of a truly human habitat.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

-Boeri Studio. (2014). Bosco Verticale. Stefano Boeri Architetti.

-Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. (2019). 50 years of tall building evolution. CTBUH Journal, 2019(IV).

-Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. (2023). Evolution of the world’s tallest buildings. CTBUH Journal, 2023(II).

-Koolhaas, R. (1978). Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. Monacelli Press.

-AMO & Koolhaas, R. (2020). Countryside, A report. Taschen. 

-Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trad.). Blackwell.

-Marcińczak, S. (2020). Vertical segregation of apartment building dwellers during late socialism in Bucharest. Urban Geography, 41(10), 1272–1294.

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-Otis Elevator Company. (2023). Our history. Otis Worldwide.

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-Schmid, C. (2014). Henri Lefebvre and the Theory of the Production of Space. Verso.

-Stefano Boeri Architetti. (2015). Bosco Verticale / Vertical Forest, Milan. ArchDaily.

-Vertical social segregation in Athenian apartment buildings. (s.f.). Athens Social Atlas.